The fact is that there are too many diversities in our land for any one version of reality to be imposed on all of us. The version propagated by the proponents of Hindutva resembles nothing so much as the arguments for the creation of Pakistan, of which Indian nationalism is the living repudiation. The Hindutva movement is the mirror image of the Muslim communalism of 1947; its rhetoric echoes the bigotry that India was constructed to reject. Its triumph would mark the end of India, and that, I am convinced, Indians will not let happen.
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In the late 1990s there was a spate of attacks on Christian churches and missionaries. I was outraged at the anti-Christian thuggery, and equally outraged that it was perpetrated in the name of Hinduism. Killers of children are not Hindus, even if they claim to be acting on behalf of their faith; it is as simple as that. Murder does not have a religion — even when it claims a religious excuse.
It is easy enough to condemn anti-Christian violence because it is violence, and because it represents a threat to law and order as well as to that nebulous entity we think of as India's “image.” But one point that has not been sufficiently made has nothing to do with the violence itself. It is the great danger of admitting a religious justification for the thugs’ actions — of seeing behind it an “understandable” Hindu resistance to Christian zealotry. The then prime minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, even called for a national debate on religious conversions. Reasonable Hindutva sympathizers went around saying, “Look, of course the violence and the killing are inexcusable and should be dealt with. But do you know how much resentment these Christian conversions have provoked? They are going around cheating people into giving up their faith. Naturally some Hindus are angry.”
That sort of line — which we have all heard, often embellished with anecdotal evidence of missionary “trickery”—comes perilously close to condoning the indefensible. Let us assume for a minute, for the purposes of argument, that Christian missionaries are indeed using a variety of inducements (development assistance, health care, education, sanitation, even chicanery) to win converts for their faith. So what? If a citizen of India feels that his faith has not helped him to find peace of mind and material fulfillment, why should he not have the option of trying a different item on the spiritual menu? Surely freedom of belief is his fundamental right, however ill founded his belief might be. And if Hindu zealots suspect that his conversion was fraudulently obtained, why do they not offer counter-inducements rather than violence? Instead of destroying churches, perhaps a Hindu-financed sewage system or paatshala might reopen the blinkered eyes of the credulous. Better still, perhaps Christians and Hindus (and Muslims and Baha'is, for that matter) could all compete in our villages to offer material temptations for religious conversions. The development of our poor country might actually accelerate with this sort of spiritual competition.
Of course, I am being frivolous there, but my point is a serious one. The prime minister's call for a national debate may be unexceptionable, but the premise behind much of the criticism of conversions is troubling. It seems to accord legitimacy to the rhetoric of the Bajrang Dal and its cohorts — who declare openly that conversions are inherently antinational. Implicit in the challenge to conversions is the idea that to be Hindu is somehow more natural, more authentically Indian, than to be anything else, and that to lapse from Hinduism is to dilute one's identification with the motherland.
As a Hindu, I reject that notion utterly. As an Indian, I have always argued that the whole point about India is the rejection of the very idea that religion should be a determinant of nationhood. Our nationalist leaders never fell into the insidious trap of agreeing that, since Partition had established a state for the Muslims, what remained was a state for the Hindus. To accept the idea of India you had to spurn the logic that divided the country in 1947.
The danger of the communalism of the majority that Nehru had warned about in 1958 is that it might be seen as nationalist. And, to our detriment, this would cause the line between Hindu nationalism and Indian nationalism to be blurred. That is what is being done by those who argue against conversions: they are suggesting that an Indian Hindu who becomes Christian is somehow, subtly, turning antinational. This is not only an insult to the millions of patriotic Indians who trace their Christianity to more distant forebears, including the Kerala Christians who converted to the faith of Saint Thomas centuries before most Europeans became Christian. It is an insult, too, to the very idea of India. Indianness has nothing to do with which God you choose to worship, or not. Even if your adherence to a particular faith has been obtained by material inducements or chicanery.
I cheerfully tell Christian audiences that Hinduism asserts that all ways of belief are equally valid, and Hindus readily venerate the saints, and the sacred objects, of other faiths. Hinduism, I assert, is a civilization, not a dogma.
If a Hindu decides he wishes to be a Christian, how does it matter that he has found a different way of stretching his hands out toward God? Truth is one, the Hindu believes, but there are many ways of attaining it.
The fact that Hinduism has never claimed a monopoly on spiritual wisdom is what has made it so attractive to seekers from around the world. Its eclecticism is its strength. My late father was a devout Hindu who prayed faithfully twice a day, after his baths. He regularly went on pilgrimages to all the major temples and religious sites in our land. When a fire engulfed the Guruvayoor temple in the 1960s, he led a fund-raising drive in Bombay that saw much of his meager savings diverted to the rebuilding of that shrine. Yet, when a Christian friend presented him an amulet of the Virgin Mary that had personally been blessed by the pope, he accepted it with reverence and carried it around with him for years. That is the Hinduism most Hindus know: a faith that accords respect and reverence to the sanctified beliefs of others.
So the rejection of other forms of worship, other ways of seeking the Truth, is profoundly un-Hindu, as well as being un-Indian. Worse, the idea of Indianness rendered by those who are against religious conversion is one that mirrors that upon which Pakistan was created, of which the nationalism of Gandhi, Nehru, and Azad is the living repudiation. In many Muslim countries it is illegal for a Muslim to convert to any other faith; in some, such apostasy is even condemnable by death. Hindus have rightly sought for years to point out how different their faith is, how India has no room for such practices. There is no such thing as a Hindu heresy. Yet, ironically, it is the most chauvinist of the Hindutva brigade who want to emulate this Muslim convention.
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The international outcry at the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas — the magnificent statues carved out of an Afghan mountainside by devout monks 1,400 years ago and described by the intrepid Chinese traveler Hsuen Tsang as among the greatest achievements of human civilization — did not take very long to die down. Within weeks, people around the world concluded that there was not much point to it anymore: the statues were gone, and the Afghan people were starving. Better attend to the living than to mourn the destroyed, many said. And who can blame them?
But one of the saddest features of this outcry, to an Indian, must be the extent to which the world's critics and commentators linked the event to another act of destruction, this time on Indian soil. I refer, of course, to the tearing down of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya in December 1992. Many foreign analysts drew a direct parallel between the two events. To take but one prominent example, the New York Times editorial observer Tina Rosenberg wrote of the Taliban's action that “such irreversible destruction of cultural and religious property has ample recent precedent.” She cited Ayodhya and its blood-soaked aftermath as her principal example, and added, “Mobs often seek to destroy religious and ethnic sites, both to intimidate the people who hold them sacred and to send the message ‘you do not belong here.’” Shamefully, that is just what an Indian mob did, and we who allowed it to happen will never be able to live it down.